Make top level menu more usable

This comment on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10022545 resonated with me.

I have links to the my popular projects bookmarked because I find the right side menu on https://gitlab.com/ too much work.

A major consumer electronics manufacturer said the same in a person to person meeting, it is too hard to locate you projects, they don't get enough real estate.

On https://gitlab.com/ the menu should be:

• Your projects (show only projects, no activity)
• Starred projects
• Explore projects
• Activity
• Your groups
• Your milestones
• Your issues
• Your snippets
• Your profile
• Help

/cc @dzaporozhets @JobV @DouweM @darby @marin @vsizov @ayufan

I think the comments that codegeek made (love the name) also resonated with me. I think the way he felt about a lot of this was similar to how I felt and is what pushed me to wanting to redesign the dashboard.

I feel that it's super important to have a way to see the projects that are relevant to you and a way to see when you've been tagged on the website. I think that would make homepage navigation so much easier.

+1 Even bringing back the grouping of repositories in the right side menu would substantially improve browsing/management.

This issue has 2 different subjects:

• move some links to sidebar (snippets, profile, explore) from right top part of screen.
• design new main page with only projects listed.

I kind of agree on making both. I propose we do first part for 8.0. In September new designer will join us so we can make a nice looking projects page for 8.1

@dzaporozhets Great!

Milestone changed to 8.0

Proposed navigation has too much elements as for me:

1. Your projects (show only projects, no activity)
2. Starred projects
3. Explore projects
4. Activity
5. Your groups
6. Your milestones
7. Your issues
8. Your merge requests
9. Your snippets
10. Explore snippets
11. Your profile
12. Help

12 items in menu is too much. I think we should group some of them by type. So it will be at least:

1. Projects
2. Activity
3. Groups
4. Milestones
5. Issues
6. Merge requests
7. Snippets
8. Profile
9. Help

Instead of having mess in sidebar with 12 elements we can group projects and snippets in one tab per sidebar and have additional navigation on page itself.

Something like this:

cc @sytses

Added ~12742 label

This makes sense, should make sure it uses sensible/configurable defaults (starred by default / all by default) or we'd be doing a step back.

This also makes it much easier to make the list of projects look nice -using cards or something-, rather than just a list.

This makes sense, should make sure it uses sensible/configurable defaults (starred by default / all by default) or we'd be doing a step back.

@JobV of course we will re-use Your/Starred preferences. No feature lost here. This is more about composing navigation correctly.

This also makes it much easier to make the list of projects look nice -using cards or something-, rather than just a list.

here we will use help of our designer :)

I think we should give it a try. Basically its just moving links. Should not take much time. Maybe I will make a MR tomorrow.

Reassigned to @dzaporozhets

@dzaporozhets Awesome!

MR - !1177 (merged)

Ok I merged navigation improvements to master except one: move activity to separate page. I think it worth separate merge request.

@dzaporozhets Awesome

I am working on moving activity to separate page. Since the only thing left on main page are projects - here is nice and clean dashboard we get now

mentioned in merge request !1198 (merged)

mentioned in commit a0284b5b

Activity to separate page was merged. 1st part of issue is done. Second part of issue is to improve projects page with professional designer. I leave it for 8.1

Milestone changed to 8.1

Assignee removed

@dzaporozhets I still think the most important thing to have on the dashboard is a notification system. Seeing when you are tagged somewhere or when others comment on an MR/issue you've made/commented on or when something is assigned to you would be priceless. I think that would make the GitLab experience 100x better

Because right now it's kind of like if Facebook didn't have notifications and everything went to your email. Imagine using Facebook in that manner. It seems that a notification system would make things way more seamless.

@darby I agree, but we need technical improvements for this I think.

@darby on facebook notification is just an red icon on head panel. So i am not sure it related to current issue. Second - you concept of notifications is too abstract to make any decisions. Try to start with issue where you describe what is notifications and how it will work. Just referencing facebook does help me to understand your idea

This issue is about making projects a main content on home page. Nothing else

design new main page with only projects listed.

this task is implemented in !1236 (merged)

So in total we did:

• refactored sidebar navigation
• designed new main page where projects get main focus

@sytses I think we fixed this issue. Feel free to close

@dzaporozhets The improvements are awesome!

Three small things:

1. 'Your projects' links to https://dev.gitlab.org/dashboard while the left side menu 'Projects' links to https://dev.gitlab.org/ I think two urls for the same content is confusing, consider having 'Your projects' link to https://dev.gitlab.org/
2. If you click on 'Profile Settings' you end up in the left menu item 'Profile' on https://dev.gitlab.org/profile, consider naming that 'Profile Settings' as well.
3. If we move 'Profile Settings' to the bottom of the left menu (below help) we can separate it with a horizontal line just like 'Settings' on the group and project pages (for example on https://dev.gitlab.org/groups/gitlab), this would make it obvious you drill down in the meny.

The improvements are awesome!

Yay!

the left side menu 'Projects' links to https://dev.gitlab.org/.

@sytses it links to default Projects page. Which can be Your projects or Starred projects, depends on your settings. Basically at https://dev.gitlab.org/ we resolve which page to show. And Your projects should always point to Your projects which is https://dev.gitlab.org/dashboard.

In future we will might change routing from https://dev.gitlab.org/dashboard and https://dev.gitlab.org/dashboard/projects/starred to https://dev.gitlab.org/projects and https://dev.gitlab.org/projects/starred.

If you click on 'Profile Settings' you end up in the left menu item 'Profile' on https://dev.gitlab.org/profile, consider naming that 'Profile Settings' as well.

makes sense. I will look into it.

If we move 'Profile Settings' to the bottom of the left menu (below help) we can separate it with a horizontal line just like 'Settings' on the group and project pages (for example on https://dev.gitlab.org/groups/gitlab), this would make it obvious you drill down in the meny.

makes sense. I will try it

@dzaporozhets MR !1260 (merged) moves some things with dashboard/explore around as well, please review/merge that before starting tweaking other things like those links and navigation options :)

@dzaporozhets thanks for the explanation about the urls, I understand now

@sytses I think we are done here. Everything was improved

Status changed to closed

@dzaporozhets The changes are awesome! The reactions on Twitter are off the scales, very nice.

And thanks for adding the horizontal line above profile settings, I see it is live on dev.

@sytses yes the result is amazing. I really enjoy new navigation.

@dzaporozhets me too